New Terrain: College Admissions in 2006

Media of every kind have documented a certain frenzied pitch to the process of transitioning to college. From inside the familiar, traditional contours of Straus Library, Milton’s college counselors scan a changed landscape, and resolutely prescribe a process that should be value-driven, individualized, sane, and, ultimately, arrive at a happy outcome.

While counselors in the college office ground their work in firm philosophical footing, Atlantic Magazine (October 2004, in an annual series about this topic) described the environment of admissions at highly selective colleges as “chaotic.” In a series of articles, writers identify dynamics that college admission officers and high school counselors around the country, including our own at Milton, agree are making what at best is an arbitrary process more challenging to negotiate or predict.
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In Their Own Words

It was a big task to take on,” said Oliver Pechenik ’06, in classic understatement. The college admission process, as Sasha Kamenetska ’06 told us, is inseparable from the senior year: the experience is one and the same. The college office views transitioning to college as a valuable part of a Milton education, a reflective and developmentally rich process.

How do students experience it? Was it a time for “personal reflection, independent reasoning and informed decision-making,” as the college office hopes?

How and when did this year’s graduates step into the much-chronicled journey? What tale do they tell about their approach, their discoveries, their effort to describe and differentiate themselves? How resilient were they? How resourceful?

Rod Skinner, director of college counseling, has written, “Our job is to guide, counsel, probe, recommend, refer, suggest, and inform. We do not decide, require, command or package.”

Despite the hovering sense that, ultimately, the “college thing” will kick in, most students are happy to wait until the annual February parents’ weekend for Class II families as the official launch. There, college counselors wisely lay out the ground rules, timelines and expectations. From that point forward, the students direct their searches.

This journey belongs to each student, and you may hear in their words what today’s well-prepared Milton boy or girl undertakes in his or her 17th or 18th year.
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What We Do
Milton College Counselors Follow a Well-Tested Plan

Milton students learn to think independently and express their ideas. That strategy works well at the college counseling office in Straus Library.

Milton builds its college counseling program around individualism. “We believe that the college counseling process begins and ends with the student,” states the college office Web site. “We do not expect students to proceed lockstep through this process…we expect students to take control [of it]. Our job is to guide, counsel, probe, recommend, refer, suggest, and inform. We do not decide, require, command, or package.” When he became the director of the college office in 1985, Chuck Duncan defined the approach that Milton still uses. Susan Case continued after Chuck’s departure, and Rod Skinner ’72 directs it today.
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The College Essay:
Four examples of a defining moment from the Class of 2006

On Jane Austen
Caity Barry-Heffernan
Yale University

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” The first time I read Pride and Prejudice, in the summer between sixth and seventh grade, the irony of its first sentence completely escaped me. Almost all the irony in it escaped me. I decided that Jane Austen, dull and uninspiring, was not for me. I kept asking myself why her characters didn’t do anything, why they panicked over insignificant events. But this summer, as I was about to enter my junior year, Pride and Prejudice was a summer reading book. Upon reading it, I found that I loved Pride and Prejudice, and I developed a profound respect for Jane Austen.
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20-20 Hindsight

“I think there is certainly work to be done in counseling students about making this decision when they’re being bombarded by the media and all the messaging that goes along with it. I think that the process—and the mistakes—can be your own.”

Paloma Herman ’02
Brown University ’06
Education

“My parents were were very clear about the fact that I would be the same person whether or not I got into my first choice school; they reminded me that I should not base my self-worth on someone else’s idea of whether I should be admitted to a school. I applied early to Brown during the first year that Brown made it a binding decision, and my comfort level with the process was in large part due to the support from my parents and the college office. The college office realizes that everyone needs different things from them. Rod Skinner helped to guide me but not push; he was there to help, and not to pressure or dissuade me.

“I was lucky to have the experience at Milton of getting excited about learning, and I found that the good things about Milton were the good things about Brown. All these unique, amazingly curious people were around me.

“At Milton I had a lot of friends in Robbins house, I played sports, I did the day-boarder exchange, and so I got an idea of what it was like to be a boarder; I was on campus 14 hours a day sometimes. Once I was in the dorm at Brown though, I was able to say, ‘Oh, so THIS is what they meant about those chats at 1 a.m.!’ I finally experienced the feeling of ‘Well, I should be doing work, but I would rather sit here and get to know my hall mate from California.’ Going to a good college is excellent, but there’s more to the education than the classroom.
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The Tufts Plan:
Admission process seeks evidence of leadership skills

Lee Coffin, dean of undergraduate admission at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, tested the secondary school admission world at Milton. He was dean of admission at Milton from 2001 to 2003. Lee takes mission statements seriously. To the extent that a school’s mission is alive in that school’s culture and priorities, the mission guides the admission decisions: Who would thrive in this environment? In turn, the students who enroll ultimately strengthen the mission. A pilot program that will be filtered into Tufts’ standard admission process aims to improve the chances of maximizing that two-way dynamic.
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Financial Aid:
The college gateway for most families

"The fraction of families who can afford not to worry about the cost of college is tiny," says Sally Donahue ’71, director of financial aid at Harvard, "and the effect on families of navigating the complex financial aid application process, as well as the admission application process, is profound." Most families realize that the cost of attending both private and public colleges has increased annually, at a rate greater than that of inflation. According to Trends in College Pricing, an annual publication of the College Board, the average charges for four-year private colleges, including tuition, fees, room and board for 2005–2006, were $29,026. The average charges for four-year public universities and colleges were $5,491.
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College: Worrying About Access

I only recently began watching the HBO drama “The Sopranos” on DVD. Among the story lines about organized crime, I was surprised to find a significant story about the college prospects of Tony Soprano’s daughter, Meadow, and younger son, AJ. If mob bosses are worried about college, then we all must be worried.

Stories about higher education in our society focus on top-tier colleges and universities, the intense and increasing competition to get in, and the ever-rising costs of tuition at private institutions. Most Milton parents, like Tony Soprano, worry about where their children will go to college. For most American families, however, the question is whether their kids will go to college.
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